Papers by Rui Ma

36 papers
OpenForecast: A Large-Scale Open-Ended Event Forecasting Dataset (2025.coling-main)

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Challenge: Existing closed-ended event forecasting methods are constrained by a limited answer space.
Approach: They introduce OpenForecast, a large-scale open-ended dataset with three open-ending event forecasting tasks and an automatic LLM-based method for complex events.
Outcome: The proposed method can be used to evaluate the ability of complex event forecasting of large language models.
CodeFlowBench: A Multi-turn, Iterative Benchmark for Complex Code Generation (2026.acl-long)

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Challenge: Modern software development demands code that is maintainable, testable, and scalable by organizing the implementation into modular components with iterative reuse of existing codes.
Approach: They propose a benchmark to evaluate LLMs' ability to perform codeflow by reusing existing functions over multiple turns.
Outcome: The proposed benchmarks show that LLMs perform significantly worse in multi-turn codeflow scenarios and that their performance inversely correlates with dependency complexity.
Mining the Past with Dual Criteria: Integrating Three types of Historical Information for Context-aware Event Forecasting (2025.emnlp-main)

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Challenge: Existing methods focus on entities and structural dependencies but overlook implicitly relevant information.
Approach: They propose a method that leverages event semantics for relevance modeling and incorporates a self-supervised semantic filter based on factual event associations to capture implicitly relevant historical information.
Outcome: The proposed method outperforms existing methods on three public benchmark datasets and is highly effective on two structured temporal knowledge graph forecasting datasets.
ShieldLM: Empowering LLMs as Aligned, Customizable and Explainable Safety Detectors (2024.findings-emnlp)

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Challenge: Existing tools for detecting safety issues in LLMs are expensive and inefficient.
Approach: They propose an LLM-based safety detector which annotates the safety of queries and provides explanations for its decisions.
Outcome: The proposed detector outperforms baselines on four sets of query-response pairs and is effective as a safety evaluator for advanced LLMs.
TrendSim: Simulating Trending Topics in Social Media Under Poisoning Attacks with LLM-based Multi-agent System (2025.findings-naacl)

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Challenge: Trending topics bring in a new channel for poisoning attacks, resulting in negative impacts on society.
Approach: They propose an LLM-based multi-agent system to simulate trending topics in social media . they propose a time-aware interaction mechanism, centralized message dissemination, and an interactive system .
Outcome: The proposed system simulates trending topics under poisoning attacks on social media platforms.
LongCLI-Bench: A Preliminary Benchmark and Study for Long-horizon Agentic Programming in Command-Line Interfaces (2026.findings-acl)

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Challenge: Existing benchmarks for agentic programming in long-horizon command-line interface tasks are limited by short task horizons, data contamination from GitHub scraping, and a lack of fine-grained evaluation metrics.
Approach: They propose a benchmark to evaluate agentic capabilities across long-horizon command-line interface tasks.
Outcome: The proposed benchmarks cover four engineering categories: from scratch, feature addition, bug fixing, and refactoring.
Entailment Tree Explanations via Iterative Retrieval-Generation Reasoner (2022.findings-naacl)

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Challenge: Large language models have achieved high performance on various natural language benchmarks, but the explainability of their output remains elusive.
Approach: They propose an architecture called iterative retrieval-generation reasoner that generates an entailment tree that explains a given hypothesis by using premises from C.
Outcome: The proposed model outperforms existing benchmarks on premise retrieval and entailment tree generation with around 300% gain in overall correctness.
Making Parameter-efficient Tuning More Efficient: A Unified Framework for Classification Tasks (2022.coling-1)

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Challenge: Large pre-trained language models (PLMs) have demonstrated superior performance in industrial applications.
Approach: They propose a framework that re-uses existing parameter-efficient methods with a unified classifier.
Outcome: The proposed framework improves the efficiency of existing parameter-efficient methods with a unified classifier.
TURINGBENCH: A Benchmark Environment for Turing Test in the Age of Neural Text Generation (2021.findings-emnlp)

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Challenge: Recent advances in generative language models have enabled machines to generate realistic texts.
Approach: They propose a benchmark environment to test the 'Turing Test' problem for neural text generation methods.
Outcome: The proposed benchmark environment is based on 200K human- or machine-generated samples across 20 labels Human, GPT-1, GTP-2_small, GTT-2_medium, GPG-2_large, GGT-2_PyTorch, GGP-3, GROVER_base, griover_large and GRover_mega.
RePair: Automated Program Repair with Process-based Feedback (2024.findings-acl)

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Challenge: Commercial-scale language models (LMs) have taken APR to unprecedented levels, but they are limited by parameters and humans interact with them through explicit prompts.
Approach: They propose a method that utilizes process supervision to improve program repair by allowing users to input feedback from compilers and test cases.
Outcome: The proposed method outperforms large outcome-based generation methods and is inspired by strategies used in programming competitions.
AntiLeakBench: Preventing Data Contamination by Automatically Constructing Benchmarks with Updated Real-World Knowledge (2025.acl-long)

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Challenge: Existing studies solve this challenge by updating benchmarks with newly collected data, but they fail to guarantee contamination-free evaluation as the newly collected knowledge may contain pre-existing knowledge.
Approach: They propose an automated anti-leakage benchmarking framework that builds and updates benchmarks without human labor instead of using newly collected data.
Outcome: The proposed framework significantly reduces the cost of benchmark maintenance to accommodate emerging LLMs.
WebAggregator: Enhancing Compositional Reasoning Capabilities of Deep Research Agent Foundation Models (2026.acl-long)

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Challenge: Existing agentic systems are retrieval-heavy but reasoning-light . current systems lack compositional reasoning, a key component of deep research .
Approach: They propose a data synthesis pipeline WebAggregator to shift agentic paradigm . they use Proactive Explorer to collect interconnected knowledge and Compositional Logic Proposer to weave knowledge into complex questions .
Outcome: The proposed pipeline surpasses GPT-4.1 and matches Claude-3.7-Sonnet on GAIA, WebWalkerQA, and XBench.
Curr-ReFT: Overcoming Training Bottlenecks in Small-scale Vision-Language Models via Curriculum Reinforcement Finetuning (2025.findings-emnlp)

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Challenge: State-of-the-art vision-language models require massive scaling that limits practical deployment.
Approach: They propose to use supervised fine-tuning to train small-scale vision-language models but face out-of-domain collapse when trained with traditional supervised learning (SFT).
Outcome: Experiments show that curr-reFT achieves state-of-the-art performance across visual tasks in both in- and out-of domain settings and benchmarks.
Low-Resource Language Expansion and Translation Capacity Enhancement for LLM: A Study on the Uyghur (2025.coling-main)

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Challenge: Extensive experiments have shown that our strategy effectively expands the low-resource languages supported by large language models and significantly enhances the model’s translation ability in Uyghur with less parallel data.
Approach: They propose a direct preference optimization based on translation self-evolution to expand low-resource languages into large language models by using Uyghur as an example.
Outcome: The proposed strategy expands low-resource languages supported by large language models and significantly enhances the model’s translation ability in Uyghur with less parallel data.
BabelDOC: Better Layout-Preserving PDF Translation via Intermediate Representation (2026.acl-demo)

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Challenge: Existing document translation pipelines face a tension between linguistic processing and layout preservation.
Approach: They propose a framework for layout-preserving PDF translation that decouples visual layout metadata from semantic content.
Outcome: The proposed framework improves layout fidelity, visual aesthetics, and terminology consistency over representative baselines while maintaining competitive translation precision.
Spider: A Large-Scale Human-Labeled Dataset for Complex and Cross-Domain Semantic Parsing and Text-to-SQL Task (D18-1)

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Challenge: Existing datasets for semantic parsing are too small in terms of number of programs for training modern data-intensive models.
Approach: They propose a large-scale complex and cross-domain semantic parsing task for a database . they use a dataset with 10,181 questions and 5,693 unique complex SQL queries .
Outcome: The proposed task is different from previous tasks because it uses the same database and program . the best model achieves only 9.7% exact matching accuracy on a database split setting.
Characterizing the Impacts of Instances on Robustness (2023.findings-acl)

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Challenge: Existing defense approaches focus on developing new model structures or training algorithms, but they do little to tap the potential of training instances.
Approach: They propose a method that can distinguish between robust and non-robust instances according to the model’s sensitivity to perturbations on individual instances during training.
Outcome: The proposed method can distinguish between robust and non-robust instances according to the model’s sensitivity to perturbations on individual instances during training.
Translation vs. Dialogue: A Comparative Analysis of Sequence-to-Sequence Modeling (2020.coling-main)

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Challenge: Existing models for machine translation and dialogue response generation require a large number of handcrafted features.
Approach: They propose to interpret a general neural model comparatively by using the seq2seq model in two mainstream NLP tasks.
Outcome: The proposed model is used in two mainstream NLP tasks and is compared with a standard model.
CPO: Addressing Reward Ambiguity in Role-playing Dialogue via Comparative Policy Optimization (2025.findings-emnlp)

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Challenge: Comparative Policy Optimization (CPO) redefines the reward evaluation paradigm by shifting from sample-wise scoring to comparative group-wise score.
Approach: They propose a method to optimize subjective tasks by shifting from sample-wise to comparative group-wise scoring.
Outcome: The proposed framework shifts from sample-wise scoring to comparative group-wise score . it minimizes contextual bias and enables more robust and fair performance evaluation.
UniPELT: A Unified Framework for Parameter-Efficient Language Model Tuning (2022.acl-long)

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Challenge: Existing methods for parameter-efficient language model tuning (PELT) match the performance of fine-tuning with fewer trainable parameters.
Approach: They propose a framework which integrates different PELT methods as submodules and learns to activate the ones that best suit the current data or task setup via gating mechanism.
Outcome: The proposed framework outperforms fine-tuning methods on the GLUE benchmark and achieves 14% gains over the best individual PELT method.
A Survey on In-context Learning (2024.emnlp-main)

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Challenge: In-context learning (ICL) is a new paradigm for natural language processing . large language models (LLMs) demonstrate the ability to learn from a few examples .
Approach: They propose to explore ICL to evaluate and extrapolate the ability of large language models.
Outcome: The proposed methods can be used to evaluate and extrapolate the ability of large language models.
A Joint Coreference-Aware Approach to Document-Level Target Sentiment Analysis (2024.acl-long)

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Challenge: Existing work on aspect-based sentiment analysis (ABSA) focuses on sentence level, document level ABSA is more practical and requires holistic document-level understanding capabilities.
Approach: They propose a learning framework to jointly model the DTSA task and the coreference resolution task using ChatGPT.
Outcome: The proposed framework reduces the reliance on annotated coreference information and alleviates evaluation bias caused by missing coreference targets.
Beyond Inherent Cognition Biases in LLM-Based Event Forecasting: A Multi-Cognition Agentic Framework (2025.findings-emnlp)

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Challenge: Large Language Models exhibit human-like cognitive biases in event forecasting . a human-curated dataset reveals significant cognitive bias in LLMs .
Approach: They propose a human-curated dataset to explore LLMs' cognitive biases . they leverage LLM participants to act as multi-cognition event participants .
Outcome: The proposed framework alleviates cognitive biases in LLMs and offers diverse perspectives.
MTR-Bench: A Comprehensive Benchmark for Multi-Turn Reasoning Evaluation (2026.acl-long)

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Challenge: Recent advances in Large Language Models (LLMs) have shown promising results in complex reasoning tasks.
Approach: They propose to use a multi-turn reasoning evaluation framework to cover multi-turn interactions with the environments of large language models.
Outcome: The proposed framework covers diverse reasoning capabilities, fine-grained difficulty granularity, and necessitates multi-turn interactions with the environments.
MMLU-ProX: A Multilingual Benchmark for Advanced Large Language Model Evaluation (2025.emnlp-main)

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Challenge: Existing large language model evaluation benchmarks focus on English, while current multilingual tasks lack parallel questions that specifically assess cross-lingual reasoning abilities.
Approach: They propose a comprehensive benchmark covering 29 languages, built on an English benchmark.
Outcome: The MMLU-ProX is a comprehensive benchmark covering 29 languages, built on an English benchmark.
Effective Long-Context Scaling of Foundation Models (2024.naacl-long)

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Challenge: Large language models (LLMs) are rapidly deployed and continue to evolve through scaling.
Approach: They propose a method to train strong long-context LLMs that are capable of utilizing massive context windows of up to 32,000 tokens.
Outcome: The proposed model can surpass gpt-3.5-turbo-16k's overall performance on long-context benchmarks with a cost-effective instruction tuning procedure that is free of expensive annotations.
Benchmarking the Fine-Grained Discriminability in Image-Text Retrieval via Controlled Contrastive Differences (2026.findings-acl)

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Challenge: Existing cross-modal image-text retrieval models often retrieve samples with inconsistent details.
Approach: They propose two fine-grained image-text retrieval benchmarks that incorporate extensive contrastive samples with one controlled contrastive difference from its anchor.
Outcome: Extensive experiments show that contrastive samples can significantly degrade retrieval performance.
An Effective and Efficient Entity Alignment Decoding Algorithm via Third-Order Tensor Isomorphism (2022.acl-long)

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Challenge: Existing methods focus on graph representation learning, but decoding is a key part of the process.
Approach: They propose an EA Decoding Algorithm via Third-order Tensor Isomorphism (DATTI) they combine two sets of isomorphic equations to enhance the decoding process .
Outcome: The proposed algorithm can deliver significant performance improvements even on the most advanced methods while the extra required time is less than 3 seconds.
HAUNTATTACK: When Attack Follows Reasoning as a Shadow (2026.findings-acl)

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Challenge: Emerging Large Reasoning Models (LRMs) excel in mathematical and reasoning tasks, showcasing remarkable capabilities.
Approach: They propose a framework that embeds harmful instructions into reasoning questions . they evaluate 11 LRMs and observe an average attack success rate of over 70% .
Outcome: The proposed framework improves reasoning models by 13 percentage points over baseline.
Self-Sum: Teaching an Agent to Decide Itself When and What to Summarize (2026.findings-acl)

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Challenge: Existing methods for summarizing long-horizon agents rely on fixed, rule-based summarization strategies.
Approach: They propose a framework that empowers agents to autonomously decide when and what to summarize by modeling it as an internal cognitive action unified with environmental actions.
Outcome: The proposed framework outperforms no-summarization and rule-based training methods on long-horizon benchmarks and shows strong generalization gains.
Be a Multitude to Itself: A Prompt Evolution Framework for Red Teaming (2024.findings-emnlp)

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Challenge: Large Language Models (LLMs) have gained increasing attention for their capacity to generate harmful content.
Approach: They propose a scalable evolution framework to evolve red teaming prompts across breadth and depth dimensions, facilitating automatic generation of numerous high-quality and diverse red team prompts.
Outcome: The proposed framework surpasses existing red teaming methods on attack success rate and diversity.
IDPG: An Instance-Dependent Prompt Generation Method (2022.naacl-main)

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Challenge: Existing prompt tuning methods use a fixed prompt in each input instance during the model training stage.
Approach: They propose a conditional prompt generation method to generate prompts for each input instance.
Outcome: The proposed method outperforms other prompt tuning methods while tuning fewer parameters.
TextFlint: Unified Multilingual Robustness Evaluation Toolkit for Natural Language Processing (2021.acl-demo)

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Challenge: Existing approaches to textual robustness evaluation focus on slightly modifying the input data, which maintains the original meaning and results in a different prediction.
Approach: They propose a multilingual robustness evaluation toolkit for NLP that integrates universal text transformations, task-specific transformations and adversarial attack.
Outcome: The toolkit includes universal text transformation, task-specific transformation, adversarial attack, subpopulation, and their combinations to provide comprehensive robustness analyses.
ASCM: An Answer Space Clustered Prompting Method without Answer Engineering (2022.findings-acl)

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Challenge: Pre-trained language models have shown a great impact on NLP tasks.
Approach: They propose an answer space clustered prompting model and a synonym initialization method that automatically categorizes all answer tokens in a semantic-clustered embedding space.
Outcome: Experiments show that the proposed method outperforms existing state-of-the-art methods in few-shot settings.
InsightPilot: An LLM-Empowered Automated Data Exploration System (2023.emnlp-demo)

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Challenge: InsightPilot is an LLM-based, automated data exploration system designed to simplify the data exploration process.
Approach: They propose an LLM-based, automated data exploration system that streamlines the data exploration process.
Outcome: InsightPilot is an LLM-based, automated data exploration system . it can help users gain valuable insights from their datasets, in a case study and in nl .

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